Reducing social welfare rates will lead to increases in poverty, social analyst organisation Social Justice Ireland has said.
Reacting to figures published today by the Central Statistics Office which show a decline in poverty, Fr Seán Healy, SMA, director of Social Justice Ireland said without social welfare payments 43 per cent of Ireland’s population would be in poverty.
The organisation said this figure drops to 14.4 per cent after social welfare payments, compared to 2004 when 19.4 per cent of the population were in poverty.
According to Fr Healy “the increases in social welfare rates in the intervening years made all the difference...these figures show clearly that if Government were to reduce welfare rates in Budget 2010 then poverty would increase and the most vulnerable in Irish society would suffer unnecessarily”.
Labour Party TD and spokeswoman on social and family affairs, Róisín Shortall, echoed Fr Healy saying “there is no doubt that the steady increases in social welfare payments over recent years contributed to the decrease in the numbers in consistent policy”.
She welcomed the key finding that consistent poverty in 2008 was down, but warned that the 14.4 per cent of the population, identified as being ‘at risk of poverty’ represented more than 600,000 people.